Bay's Visually Arresting and Mildly Diverting Smorgasbord of Futuristic Movie Clichés

Rating: 5/10 (12 December 2005)

As the king of big-budget Hollywood bombast, director Michael Bay has a reputation so commercially oriented that it's hard to view his films without some amount of visceral disdain. His latest venture is not an artistic breakthrough for him, by any means, but it is a diverting though overlong entertainment that seems to be an amalgam of John Frankenheimer's 1966 sleeper "Seconds", Ridley Scott's classically visionary 1982 "Blade Runner", Michael Anderson's comparatively cheesy 1976 "Logan's Run" and Philip Kaufman's 1979 savvy update of "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" with plenty of references to Bay's previous blockbusters thrown in as well. Clocking in at 136 minutes, the result is a confusing shuffle, but he has certainly assembled a grade-A cast to inhabit the rather cartoonish roles headed up by Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johansson as two residents of a sterile, futuristic society. Their characters' names - Lincoln Six-Echo and Jordan Two-Delta - should give you fair warning of the world in which they inhabit with trepidation, and the first hour seems like it could lead to a more thoughtful analysis of the transience of identity at a time when it is not valued.
The cliché-ridden screenplay (co-written by Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci and Caspian Tredwell-Owen) provides the derivative concept of a brilliant but greedy scientist who has figured out how to clone the rich and famous in order to allow them to take organs or even entire bodies when age and disease set in. The clones - unable to mature beyond the age of fifteen (how convenient) - are programmed to think they are humans living underground to avoid contamination unbeknownst to their ultimate fate. Alas, once Lincoln and Delta figure out what's going on, we enter Los Angeles in the year 2019 as envisioned by Bay as a series of skyward collisions and exploding buildings. This is when the movie either escalates into high gear for Bay aficionados or disintegrates into a morass of action set pieces, though granted, Bay's use of giant metal spools as terrorizing traffic devices is genuine good fun. Unfortunately though, I am still of the latter camp, and shame on me for having any higher expectation for this sort of popcorn filler. The overstylized cinematography of Mauro Fiore, which smacks of new millennium commercials on upscale product placement, is another dead giveaway.
Out of his Obi-Wan Kenobi guise, McGregor can get rather unctuous as a leading man, especially when the clone confronts his Scottish-accented antecedent, an obviously direct cousin to his smarmy Catcher Block in Peyton Reed's "Down With Love". Johansson is certainly luscious enough for her part, though she is not called upon to use her penetrating intelligence by any means. It's also disheartening to see a scene where she reacts emotionally to her duplicate within the actress's famous Calvin Klein ad. Sean Bean and Djimon Hounsou play the parts of the scientist and his chief mercenary with predictable malice, though the latter has some unexplained epiphany toward the end. There is an extended cameo by Steve Buscemi, which is welcome at that point of the story though it's rather anachronistic and overly convenient. The ending is a bit of a bore given all that has come before, but it doesn't really matter, as Bay has concocted a movie that should please most of his fans and may even recruit a few new ones.